Friday, November 07, 2008

At last someone has fingered the addle-headed bungler principally responsible for the unlawful killing. Her open Lesbianism has protected her so far but one hopes that her incompetence will finally be accepted

A former Scotland Yard chief has attacked the officer in charge of the operation which led to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. Brian Paddick criticised an "ambiguous" order from Cressida Dick over the death of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles De Menezes.

Brian Paddick, who retired as a Metropolitan Police chief last year, criticised an "ambiguous" order from Deputy Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick and questioned how she ran the operation at an inquest into the death of the innocent Brazilian. Mr Paddick said that in the role she was assigned, Ms Dick should only have been concerned with ordering a critical shot at Mr de Menezes and should not have been involved with the minute-by-minute detail of the tragic operation.

Mr Paddick said: "My understanding of the role of the DSO (designated senior officer) is to make decisions around when officers are confronted by a suicide bomber who is suspected of being about to detonate a device. That officer is designated only to deal with the critical shot decision."

Earlier in the inquest, Ms Dick said that she had not directly ordered Mr Menezes to be shot, but had asked firearms officers to stop him.

Mr Paddick told the inquest Ms Dick's order to "arrest him, but whatever you do, don't let him get on the Tube" was open to misinterpretation. The retired senior officer, who was himself a deputy assistant commissioner before he left the Met, said: "I think in the scenario that we had, where you have got a DSO, you have got officers with unusual ammunition, you have got a suspected suicide bomber, that order is ambiguous and it could mean one or two things depending on your frame of mind as to how you interpret it."

Mr Paddick also said that under Scotland Yard policy, officers should also warn suspects before opening fire if they were not convinced that they were a terrorist. The question of whether officers shouted a warning before killing Mr de Menezes has been central to the inquest.

Mr Paddick said: "If there is nothing that they see that undermines what the DSO has told them then they are authorised to take a critical shot without warning. "If, having been authorised to take the critical shot, the firearms officers have some doubt, there's an extra bit of information that clearly the DSO has not had, who's not there on the scene, then the firearms officers should give a warning and then respond to the suspect on the basis of how the suspect responds to that warning."

Dedication

In memory of Fatty Arbuckle, a good and innocent man whose movie career as a comedian was ruined by an opportunistic prosecution. The woman he was accused of murdering almost certainly died of natural causes. He was eventually cleared but the damage was done.

A thought

I love the Mae West story where some judge wearing a robe during the middle of the day, and seated in a high chair peered down and asked her, 'Are you showing contempt for my court?' To which she replied, 'I’m doing my best not to show it, your honor.' Maybe we need to give up trying to not show it."